In one other ballad of kindred structure does Rossetti sustain a similar flow of exquisite imagination, in verbal beauty and subtlety of idiom hard to surpass in modern English verse. “The Bride’s Prelude” is indeed but a lovely fragment, a delicate vignette, a little character-sketch bathed in the warmest and finest of mediæval colouring; a prelude only, as it modestly claims to be; but, like Chopin’s preludes in music, so perfect in its limited range that the ear craves no further melody for a long while after its brief passion has sung itself to rest. It is a bride’s confession to her younger sister on her wedding morn; and, taking the form of a broken monologue interspersed with descriptive passages of the highest poetic order, its movement is more deliberate, its ornament more richly wrought, perhaps, than that of the more dramatic ballads. It might almost be said that nowhere else does Rossetti so oppress the reader with the actual feeling of the atmosphere in which the tale is told. The intense and sultry stillness of the chamber at mid-noon, where the two women sit together probing for the first and only time the one dire secret of the past, weighs upon us like veritable glare and burning silence, save for the bride’s difficult speech, and the shocked sister’s faint answers, and the keen, far-off sounds in the courtyard below, till the last word is said. Every minute detail of sight and sound heightens the effect of warmth and colour in contrast to the bare simplicity and hard tragedy of the narrative. “The room lay still in dusty glare, Having no sound through it Except the chirp of a caged bird That came and ceased: and if she stirred, Amelotte’s raiment could be heard. “Although the lattice had dropped loose, There was no wind; the heat Being so at rest that Amelotte Heard far beneath the plunge and float Of a hound swimming in the moat. “Some minutes since, two rooks had toiled Home to the nests that crowned Ancestral ash-trees. Through the glare Beating again, they seemed to tear With that thick caw the woof o’ the air.” Such fragments afford the merest glimpses of the background, the pure, delicate, ultra-refined, and yet intensely naturalistic setting of the poem.